here has
been a new and noteworthy conquest over indifference and over that sacred
silence which was supposed to encompass all sexual topics with suitable
darkness. The banishment of that silence in the cause of social hygiene
is, indeed, not the least significant feature of this agitation. * * *

"By insuring that our workers, and especially our women workers, are
decently paid, so that they can live comfortably on their wages, we shall
not, indeed, have abolished prostitution, which is more than an economic
phenomenon, but we shall more effectually check the white slave trader
than by the most Draconic legislation the most imaginative vice crusader
ever devised. And when we insure that these same workers have ample time
and opportunity for free and joyous recreation we shall have done more to
kill the fascination of the white slave traffic than by endless police
regulations for the moral supervision of the young.

"No doubt the element of human nature in the manifestations we are
concerned with will still be at work, an obscure instinct often acting
differently in each sex, but tending to drive both into the same risks.
Here we need even more fundamental social changes. It is sheer
foolishness to suppose that when we raise our little dams in the path of
a great stream of human impulse that stream will forthwith flow calmly
back to its source. We must make our new channels concurrently with our
dams. We can at least begin today a task of education which must slowly
though surely undermine the white slave trader's stronghold. Such an
education needs to be not merely instruction in the facts of sex and wise
guidance concerning all the dangers and risks of the sexual life; it must
also involve a training of the will, a development of the sense of
responsibility, such as can never be secured by shutting our young people
up in a hothouse, sheltered from every fortifying breath of the outside
world."

It was in Illinois that Abraham Lincoln--a Southerner, Kentucky
born--threw down the gage in his famous Bloomington speech in the matter
of buying and selling human beings as slaves. It is in Illinois--in spite
of much disgrace which the State's fair name has had forced upon it--that
men and women have enlisted for life to fight in the battle against
buying and selling white girls, to fight against that special dealing in
"live stock" actually known to have gone on for years, which is Chicago's
special shame as a distributing